Reviews of truly outstanding game music
Before developer Rare became one of gaming’s powerhouses in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it toiled away for several years as one of the many companies churning out NES titles for various distributors. One of those distributors was LNJ – infamous for the usually low quality of the products that the company peddled. Rare developed more than a few of their games – almost all of them justifiably forgotten.
The Battletoads soundtrack might be David Wise’s best and most creative NES score. That’s certainly no small feat – after all, Wise scored a whopping 46 NES games during his prolific career. Of course, a soundtrack release was all but impossible in 1991. It took until 2015 – when enterprising game music label iam8bit released a raft of Rare scores on vinyl – that the Battletoads soundtrack received its belated, but very much deserved album release.
It’s a shame that Neil Baldwin wrote his two best NES soundtracks for games that in the end were shelved. At least game music fans discovered Hero Quest‘s excellent score once the game’s developer released the ROM online. On the other hand, Baldwin’s second cancelled project Erik the Viking was pretty much unknown. That is, until Baldwin posted the soundtrack on his website Duty Cycle Generator.
After the release of Final Fantasy II, developer Square found itself in a peculiar position. Not many studios would start experimenting with a successful formula that had just saved them from financial ruin. However, that’s precisely what Square did after Final Fantasy, handing over the reins for its sequel to newcomer Akitoshi Kawazu (future mastermind of the SaGa franchise). The result was a divisive game whose compelling gameplay experiments were ultimately poorly implemented. For Final Fantasy III, Square decided to take no risks, returning to many of the story tropes and design elements that had made Final Fantasy so popular. However – apart from a much larger game world – the developers made one crucial addition: a job system that allowed gamers to swap the protagonists’ character class on the fly, allowing for far greater customisation and gameplay depth.
Even at the height of the NES’ popularity, there were no official album releases of Western NES game music. That makes a website like Neil Baldwin‘s Duty Cycle Generator a very important contribution towards closing this gap. On his site, game music veteran Baldwin, whose career began on the C64, released all of his NES soundtracks. Baldwin pointed out that part of the reason his website exists was the praise one of his works had generated within online chiptune communities. That score was Hero Quest, the video game version of the popular fantasy-themed board game. The score’s popularity was all the more surprising considering that the game was cancelled. However, its developer Chris Shrigley released it years later into the NES community, and its reputation built over time. Baldwin’s surprised discovery of the Hero Quest soundtrack’s popularity also kickstarted his involvement with the online game music community.
Among the original properties Rare launched on the NES and Game Boy, the Snake Rattle ‘n’ Roll games must rank among the best, up there with the Battletoads franchise. Inspired by Marble Madness’ isometric view (Rare developed the NES port), the developers concocted a joyfully bizarre and off-beat – not to mention funny – platformer. Its stars are a couple of snakes that need to gobble up as many enemies as they can, so they’re heavy enough when hopping on the scales at the end of each level, hoping to be admitted to the next stage. Initially released on the NES in 1991, Snake Rattle ‘n’ Roll’s playability and creative multiplayer mode made the game enough of a success to warrant a Sega Genesis port in 1993, netting equally strong reviews. Meanwhile, the Game Boy saw an original, somewhat more middling 2d platformer starring the two slithering protagonists.
If you take a closer look at the history of movies and their video game adaptations, James Cameron’s 1991 Terminator 2: Judgment Day emerges as a watershed moment. At the time of its release, T2 became one of the highest-grossing movies of all time worldwide. Its futuristic, action-packed plot and revolutionary visuals made T2 an obvious candidate for a video game adaptation. What’s more, the film was released when the home video game market had diversified and matured, to the point where it could simultaneously support two console generations. The result was a glut of T2-related games, followed soon by numerous titles based on The Terminator. The creators of Terminator 2: Judgment Day were undoubtedly aware of video games’ commercial potential. After all, the film’s end credits finished with a message reading, “Play the hit Nintendo game from Acclaim/LJN Entertainment.”